One of Those Parent-Teacher Things

I've been rehearsing what I'll say all day inside my head. Theresa Thatcher will see my wife and do that exploding face thing, faking the joy with arms out, pretending it isn't the most awkward situation in the world. She's so glad to see us and how have we been?

I don't want to seem rude, I'll explain, but the thing is that we don't like you very much, so we're going over here now, and we'll walk away, easy as that.

'We'll be polite,' Bess tells me in the car. 'We'll be polite and then we'll walk away.'

'My way would be polite though,' I say, 'maybe a bit direct, but still not actually telling the woman to fuck off.'

Unfortunately I know that my wife is probably right.

The woman isn't really named Theresa Thatcher, but she carries herself with both the warmth and sincerity of the two female British Prime Ministers and has similar hair, so she's Theresa Thatcher for the next couple of paragraphs. She is mother to Devil Boy, possibly the most evil child I've ever encountered outside of an Omen movie. She is motivated almost entirely by money so far as any of us can tell. We thought we'd seen the last of her, but no, Devil Boy has been signed up for this same school. He's in our kid's class.

We're on the way to the high school because it's one of those parent-teacher things. We're late. We were supposed to be there at ten to six, a time which seemed to presuppose that most parents will be wealthy oil tycoons who don't actually have to work for a living. It's a private school, so most parents probably are something along those lines, and we're the exception. The boy decided he wanted to attend this school, and the relatives who can afford to stump up the lolly said yes, so here we are. If it were up to us he'd be at a regular school, but never mind.

Don't worry about it, I told Bess. We'll eat as usual, and we'll go after that and see what happens. If we're late it's tough shit. They should have started at a more reasonable time, like seven.

We're supposed to be there at ten to six to pick up our schedule, whatever the hell that is. My understanding of parent-teacher evenings is that we, the parents by some definition, get to speak to the boy's teachers, but apparently it isn't that simple and we need a schedule. It's going to be an experience of some kind. Even without it being an experience, I don't really see the need.

The teachers are paid to teach.

Logically, they'll either spend the time snorting coke, setting things on fire, rampaging around the school with a hand gun, and telling kids with questions about the curriculum to go ask someone who gives a shit; or maybe they'll do their jobs and teach. I'm banking on it being the second option, and I'm so confident of this being the case that I don't require reassurance or even a demonstration. I seem to recall my mother telling me that she only ever attended one parent-teacher evening and never bothered after that because it was difficult to see what difference any of it made to anything.

The parking lot is full of trucks due to this being Texas. Many Texans drive trucks because they are engaged in work which requires heavy machinery or livestock moved from one place to another in rural areas. Other Texans drive trucks because they're idiots with too much money and are probably compensating for something underwhelming in the trouser department. My wife and I keep driving until we can no longer see trucks, then we park in what space is available.

Once inside, we realise that the parents of the entire school are here, pretty much. The place is heaving. For some reason I had assumed it would be just parents of children in our boy's year, but no - which at least explains the need of a schedule. Each parent has an itinerary based on a typical day of lessons undertaken by their child, but scaled down to ten minute periods. Junior apparently kicks off the day with an hour or so of algebra, so that's our first class, followed by ten minutes of geography, then English and so on. It's all been scheduled so as to prevent disaster should seven-hundred parents have decided they all want to find out what their kid gets up to in the Latin class at the same time.

We collect a schedule from the cafeteria, then make our way to a classroom containing the parents of all the kids who have algebra first thing on a Monday morning. There's a teacher at the front, stood before a massive flat screen where I'd expected to see a blackboard. She's explaining to us that she's going to do her best to teach our kids how to do really complicated sums, and she gives us her email address so we can get in touch if we have any questions. Unfortunately we spot Theresa Thatcher sat at the front, and she's seen us, even though she's pretending she hasn't because it's awkward.

Suddenly this first session is at an end. I'm not sure we're any richer for having been here, and now we have to find our way to a geography class in some other room. The corridors are lined with lockers which doubtless have pin-ups of Michael J. Fox or Cheryl Ladd selotaped inside the door. It feels like I'm trapped in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Everywhere I look I see squareness and team spirit worn with pride. I can see nothing I recognise from my own time at school, other than the basic configuration of hominids within a building.

We dive into a darkened theatre, following other parents similarly swarming towards geography.

'I'm so glad to see you,' beams Theresa Thatcher out of nowhere. 'How have you been?'

Fuck.

She asks whether our boy is taking drama, that being the function of the darkened theatre.

Nope.

We're away through the other door, into daylight. We've escaped.

We climb stairs to the geography room, another teacher stood in front of a massive flat screen telling us his email address. We take seats, those screwy plastic chairs with an arm rest upon which you can lean to write or take notes. They don't even have desks as I understand it, nowhere to carve swastikas, skulls, the logos of heavy metal bands, or messages casting aspersions on the sexual preferences of other pupils. It feels as though we're in training for office work, as I suppose we are.

The teacher fills the screen with a page explaining which parts of the globe the kids will be studying over the coming year. It looks as though it will be mostly in socio-economic terms, with much less emphasis on plate tectonics or colouring around the edge of your fjord with a blue pencil, although I could be wrong. The teacher additionally informs us that he will be taking a dim view of anyone found playing with their phone in class, explaining in no uncertain terms that they will be told to put their phone away. I'm not even sure where to begin with this idea.

The bell goes and our ten minutes are up. The bell is actually a harsh electronic tone of the kind which alerts citizens to the arrival of a new batch of soylent green in a dystopian movie.

Everything is different. My school was primarily about teachers writing things in chalk on a blackboard, following which we would usually take books out of our desks - an operation effected by raising the lid - either to read them or write in them. I recall my dad's account of writing on a piece of slate at his school and how archaic it sounded to me even when he first told me, and realise I am now at a similar remove from the present. I am waiting to see how anything is improved.

We enter the English class. My wife is suddenly excited to see someone and is making all the noises. There's Theresa Thatcher half way up out of her chair in response, but both of us seem confused; then I recognise Duncan's mother. We'd forgotten her kid is also here, so that's nice, and it is indeed good to see her. Bess later tells me she felt hugely awkward, having failed to spot Theresa Thatcher seated in the next row. I had assumed it was deliberate.

The English class seems to combine what I recall as having been two separate lessons, literature and grammar. I glance around the room. There are two book shelves. One contains generic text books. the other is empty. It seems to me that an English classroom should maybe have a few more books. The teacher tells us that she expects her pupils to spend the first five minutes of each lesson reading a novel, something of their own choice. Somehow I don't find this reassuring.

The next classroom is full of sporting paraphernalia, trophies lined up on every surface, framed photographs of winning teams, pin-ups of soccer players, and a fish tank.

'I like the fish,' I tell my wife.

'This is the biology lesson,' she explains.

I look around. There's a poster featuring a cartoon octopus on the rear wall, otherwise it's mostly sport.

'He's the PE teacher,' my wife elaborates. 'Physical education staff over here tend to have a second subject, something else they teach, although it's usually history that suffers.'

I take another look around the room. It's mostly about him, not very much relating to biology. He tells us his email address in case we have any questions, then describes his teaching methodology by means of an acronym, GTS. He doesn't believe in just filling their heads with meaningless facts. He prefers to show them how to find out those facts for themselves, how to Google That Stuff, which is somehow delivered to his audience as a sales pitch.

Science, and specifically marine biology, is one of our boy's favourite things. We now understand why he hasn't been telling us much about the class in his usual way.

The bell goes.

Religious instruction follows. We're invited to ask questions.

'I don't want to seem facetious,' I say, 'but what are you teaching here? Do you deal with other faiths, or are you mainly focussed on Christianity?'

'Well we're starting with the Book of Genesis,' he tells me, 'so that mentions polytheistic faith.'

This answers my question in a way which does nothing to contradict the impression that has been forming over the last hour.

'Tell me,' he asks, 'is there anyone here for whom religion was unimportant when they were growing up.'

About a third of us raise our hands and he starts asking for reasons. Sadly the bell goes before he gets to me.

Finally, we end up in the Latin class. It isn't on the schedule but we were passing and we just happened to see the teacher. It's just the three of us, so we actually get to have a conversation with the guy.

'You know our boy picked this place because of the Latin?'

He didn't, but he's gratified to find this out. He talks some more, at last introducing something positive to my impression of this apparently expensive school. His room is decorated with posters relating to his subject, even with a small mosaic on board depicting the Minotaur at the centre of a labyrinth.

We finally leave with something to consider, and the rest will, I suppose, just have to look after itself.

Some Spider Grandmothers Do 'Ave 'Em

Aliksa'i. People were living at Oraibi. Lots of people of the Hopituh Shi-nu-nu were living there, but our story is concerned only with the family of Hawiovi, that is Hawiovi himself and his long suffering wife. Her name was Honovi which means Strong Deer, which was lucky because the name of her husband had the meaning Going Down the Ladder and it was said that this seemed appropriate only because had he gone up the ladder, he would certainly either have fallen off or dropped something on the heads of those stood below.

One day it transpired that the Spider Grandmother had given Honovi a child. Her belly was a little bigger than usual, and it is also true that Hawiovi had recently found her thighs to be a little more pale than usual, because that is how such things work. All the same, being with child, she continued to grind her corn and to weave her mats. Many times would the moon pass before she had to seek a blessing from Tawa, the sun.

'You should be careful,' said Hawiovi full of concern, because he was ever full of concern. On this day he seemed to be full of a quite unusual quantity of concern. He stood at the entrance of the dwelling and it seemed as though he was dancing upon the spot. He held his headdress in his hands, mashing it and spinning it around as though it were a wheel. His face was like that of a child looking at the moon for the first time. He looked all around. 'Ooh Honovi,' he said for no obvious reason and bit his lower lip.

'Honestly, Hawiovi,' said his wife, 'sometimes I think it is you that is having the baby and not me. You do worry so. Tell me what is on your mind?'

Hawiovi's face became full of blood as the truth was divined, or at least as it was divined that there was a truth which might be uncovered. He started to laugh and his laugh was like the gurgle of a child, but then he held up his finger as though about to make a point. 'I cannot tell a lie,' he said. 'I've been having a bit of trouble.'

'Trouble, Hawiovi? What can you mean?' It seemed that although Honovi had asked the question, she didn't really want to hear the answer.

'Well, I don't like to say,' said Hawiovi with difficulty. 'Can we just say that the Spider Grandmother has not wished to speak with me in a long time.'

'Oh dear,' said his wife. She knew the ways of her husband, how he would say one thing and mean something else. She understood his problem very well.

It is known that sometimes when the Spider Grandmother wishes to speak with us, she makes us feel as though we want to defecate. She then talks to us once we are about our business, because this is the time when we are nearly always alone.

Hawiovi went to see Wikvaya, the medicine man.

'What seems to be the problem, Hawiovi?' asked Wikvaya as he prepared a pipe. 'Is everything well with you at home?'

Hawiovi stood at the entrance of the sweat lodge and it seemed as though he was dancing upon the spot. He held his headdress in his hands, mashing it and spinning it around as was his habit. His face was again like that of a child looking at the moon for the first time. He looked all around. He made as though to giggle, but instead said, 'Having a baby.'

'Well, that is good news,' Wikvaya said, casting his eyes upwards in silent thanks for such blessings as are given by the Spider Grandmother, then before he could ask more, Hawiovi was already speaking.

'I've been having a bit of trouble, but I don't really like to say...'

'Come, come,' said the medicine man, 'we are both men of the fourth world. There is nothing you could possibly tell me which might cause surprise. I'm not some Navajo, you know.'

'It's down there.' Hawiovi pointed with a finger, indicating his personal areas. 'It won't come out.'

It seemed as though there was the sound of riotous laughter in the air, and it continued for several minutes. Wikvaya wore an expression of great shock on his face. His mouth was open and his eyebrows were set high upon his forehead. He seemed to think that Hawiovi had claimed to be with child, but Hawiovi's complaint was that he temporarily found himself unable to defectate. That was the root of their misunderstanding, and the two men spoke at crossed purposes for a long time. Had the misunderstanding been resolved sooner, they might have seen the funny side, but instead they experienced only frustration. And here the story ends.

Gospel

'There's this church I'd like us to go to,' Bess told me. 'Our security guard preaches there, and I've told him we would go.'

It seemed an unusual suggestion given that I've spent most of my life avoiding churches, or at least avoiding the services taking place within; but on the other hand, I tend to trust my wife's judgement on most things.

I intersected with the Church of England only infrequently whilst growing up, mostly weddings, funerals and baptisms and probably not quite reaching double figures. The Reverend Dilwyn Morgan Davies made regular visits to Ilmington Junior and Infants School, pootling the hundred yards down the road from St. Mary's to deliver unto us a weekly sermon during school assembly. He resembled Spike Milligan's impersonation of a Church of England vicar and all I can recall were his overly dramatic performances stretching out each syllable of his own name, then Mattheeeeeeeeeew, Maaaaaaaaaark, Luke and [pause for breath] Johhhhhnnnnn, none of which left me with any enduring impression of who these people were or why it might concern me. With hindsight, he was good with children in that he made us laugh, and he was a lot more entertaining than the anonymously stuttering pink-faced goons presiding at most services I've witnessed since.

My view of religion is probably too messy and sprawling to be of much use in the context of this particular sermon, but could probably be distilled to if it works for you, then fine. Whilst history is a testament to the many unspeakable crimes perpetrated in the name of one religion or another, I would suggest that the overwhelming majority of these crimes derive from human ambition expressed as power structures within which religion tends to have been co-opted as one of a number of supports. If you're one of those people who genuinely seem to believe that religion must be wiped from the face of the earth in order for a better society to come into being, then I'd suggest you're as bad as any witch hunter, any inquisitional wielder of a burning brand, or any snake oil selling televangelist bleeding money from his flock; and I'd also suggest that you haven't really made an effort to appreciate what religion is, what it does, or why it would mean anything to so many people. If that's too hard to understand, then it's the wiping things from the face of the earth detail which is the problem, not the identity of whoever may be calling for the wiping.

Anyway, Bess had told me that some guy from her work place was a preacher at a church, and she had asked me to come along to a service. I said yes because it would be a new thing for me.

She'd already been to a service a few months earlier when I'd been tied up with something or other. The security guard was actually one Reverend Gregory Harris and it was his church, inherited from his father, the previous incumbent. It was called the White Robe Missionary Baptist Church and was situated over on the eastside - the black neighbourhood, so to speak. I'm still a little phased by large American cities being so clearly racially divided, but then I've only been here five or six years and segregation was a recent thing in this country. The service, so my wife reported back, had been small but powerful. The congregation was just a handful of people gathered in a church resembling what I would think of as a village hall, and which could have stood a few repairs here and there. It was at the opposite end of the scale to the huge evangelical money-hoovering schemes I see at the side of the highway heading to Austin, buildings gleaming as though from the covers of seventies science-fiction paperbacks, places I avoid because I don't want to be either mugged or brainwashed by anyone less intelligent than myself.

My experience of Baptist churches is limited to Helen Martin battling a rival grandmother in Don't Be a Menace to South Central When You Drink Your Juice in the Hood, and skits on southern rap albums, skits mostly using organ swells to emphasise a testimonial condemnation of persons who be playa-hatin' on Master P and that sort of thing. So realistically, I really didn't know what to expect, although I felt anything in the vein of Helen Martin's spontaneous breakdancing was probably unlikely.

The place was small and, as promised, not in a great state of repair, but you could see that they had done what they could with it. There were four rows of pews, and with padded seating which made for a nice change. There were nineteen of us once everyone had arrived, a couple of kids, some Latinas, and just four white people - which I found oddly comforting. You get less bullshit flying around in the absence of white people, and I say that in the awareness of being one myself. A woman introduced as Miss Wells played the piano. The instrument probably could have stood a little tuning, but I have a vague memory of piano-tuning being expensive, so she made do with what she had. She played well, with bluesy passion and a real feeling for the music, and so well that it ceased sounding like an early Residents album after just a few minutes. Miss Wells also led us in song, mostly compositions of just one line repeated over and over, mostly relating to having faith in Jesus as you would expect; and because it was just one line repeated over and over, it was easy enough to join in, so we all did; and of course we clapped our hands. Seen from outside it would have struck me as odd, but I was taken by the moment and it felt pretty good; and - just like on the telly - our song was augmented with random interjections of tell it like it is or amen to that and the like, and all quite natural and heartfelt - none of the showboating or ostentatious piety I've seen elsewhere. The singing brought us all together in such a way as to make it seem ridiculous that anyone should feel self-conscious or awkward in the company of these strangers. I've resentfully muttered along to the hymns in the few church services I've previously attended because I've always felt like an intruder, like I'm required to do time before being given the secret code, but this felt entirely different.

Song alternated with sermon, readings from the New Testament delivered with warmth and in terms of our daily lives, and even with jokes. I still feel that the major problem with many faiths - or at least certain brands of Christianity - has been a tendency to focus on the speaker more than what is said, so it becomes a money-spinning fan club with no real currency in the message of doing unto others as you would have done unto you, because that would interfere with the direction in which the dollars are supposed to flow. Here I realised that the emphasis seemed different, and that the message was heard very well, and that the message was helping some of these people get through the day.

This was underscored by the individual testimonies which followed. Members of the congregation stepped forward and told their stories - personal trials and tribulations, poverty, death, cancer, domestic violence, and more; and in each case thanks were given to the man upstairs for his help in getting them through their troubles, for keeping them straight. My inner Richard Dawkins - thankfully a fairly muted voice these days - rationalised that these people had simply found God in their own strength of character, which may be true but misses all of the important points. If that which serves as your point of focus helps you in times of trouble and isn't hurting anyone else, then maybe what we call it is secondary.

The full service lasted about two hours, never once seeming to drag, and what most impressed me about it was how honest it felt. It was a communal experience. We had two preachers and Miss Wells at the piano, but we were all of us involved in one way or another, and there was nothing which felt forced or like it was going through the motions. It felt like we had been brought together by a message, albeit through the agency of a messenger, and the experience had done all of us good. This was no emptily ritualised worship thrown dutifully in the general direction of the heavens. It was something fundamentally human and real.

Afterwards we had food, barbecued chicken, brisket and beans with cornbread. I found myself sat next to the Reverend Larry Smith who had also spoken that morning. He told me he was born in Louisiana but had spent some time in England, which he mentioned because I'd brought it up, telling him, 'I'm not from around here - I guess you can tell by the accent.' Despite his earlier half hour under the spotlight, he seemed a shy, retiring type, so I figured I might as well do the honours with regard to the jolly old elephant in the drawing room.

'I was at Greenham Common,' he told me. 'That was back in the nineties.'

'You were at Greenham Common!'

'I was in the air force, you know?'

I've known several people who were at Greenham Common, but they'd all been on the other side of the fence; and now here was a guy who'd been paid to load bombs onto the aircraft which had drawn protesters to the base in the first place.

'So how did you find England?' I wasn't even sure I should have asked, given the potential for a seriously uncomfortable answer.

'I liked it, but you know when you're on a military base you don't really get to see too much of the outside world.' He asked me about England and why I wasn't there any more, so I told him about getting married and how much I hated the cold. 'It must have been rough for you if you grew up in Louisiana with the heat.'

'Well yeah, I didn't like the cold too much, and it rained a lot.'

I told him I had been a postman for twenty years. 'Outside in the wind and rain, and you know how sometimes the cold just gets into your bones and there's nothing can shift it...'

'I'm a mailman myself.'

'You deliver the mail too!' I couldn't help laughing. We both laughed.

'I got me a route over on the westside. I been doing that seventeen years.'

At that point we had finished our food, so we said our farewells and left. I still don't feel particularly converted, but we left with that glow you develop in the company of good people, or in this case, great people with whom I feel honoured to have spent time. The world can be a shitty place, but I try to maintain a belief that no-one is deliberately evil and that the majority are generally good, and every so often it's nice to be reminded that this is surely something more than just a belief.

Children of Abraham II

Whilst browsing for Halloween clobber at the local Goodwill, I'd noticed several suit jackets. Now I'd gone back to buy one. I once wore suits all the time - nothing flashy and nothing too businessy, just whatever I'd found in the local charity shop which looked reasonably smart, usually worn with a plain white shirt and sometimes a tie. I've always liked a nice suit. I've always liked that a nice suit isn't jeans and a t-shirt with a slogan, or indeed anything signifying the three years of commodified teenage rebellion traditionally occurring at the tail end of school or college and just before you take that job with Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson & Johnson. It's not that I've ever been a mod of any description, but a decent suit works anywhere under almost any circumstances. I went to Mexico in a suit five times and never had any trouble. Taxi drivers assumed I was some kind of businessman rather than a tourist, and possibly also German rather than American or English. People generally left me alone, presumably taking my slightly lived-in appearance to mean that I wasn't the sort of businessman who made any money.

Keen to distance myself from men dressed as giant children - sneakers, shorts, baseball cap, t-shirt sporting a picture of a cartoon character, and often seen driving a truck resembling a Claes Oldenburg recontextualisation of a Tonka toy - I decided I needed a suit. Also, we had a Bar mitzvah to attend, and Bess suggested formal attire would be appreciated.

Previous girlfriends had frowned upon my suits, missing the point, believing I would do better to act my age which somehow meant pretending to be eighteen, pretending to be into either Lush or Groove Armada, and pretending to give a pungent brown one about anything recommended by Time Out magazine. With hindsight, I'm surprised Marian didn't explicitly order me to grow a beard and take to wearing a cloth cap. Possibly that would have been next on the agenda had I not jumped ship. On the other hand, Bess told me I looked very smart, which was nice; and on an unrelated note, it occurred to me that this was the second weekend running of my visiting Goodwill in search of clothing appropriate to the context of an Abrahamic faith besides Christianity. Also, I was pleased to see that the cuddly tiger with the winning smile had gone, suggesting that someone had given him a good home.

We turn up at nine in the morning, an hour which surprises us all as I've long since ceased to associate it with appointments of any kind less dramatic than catching a plane. It's a synagogue identified on the invitation as Congregation Agudas Achim, the Yiddish apparently meaning Fellowship of Brothers. I've reached my fifties without ever having been inside a synagogue or having knowingly had much contact with Jewish culture or anyone Jewish, at least not beyond Sid - whom I suppose might be considered my stepfather-in-law by some definition - and my friend Mhairi, a woman to whom I once delivered mail and whose intelligent conversation rendered the job less of a chore on a number of occasions. Anyway, we're looking at a three-hour ceremony, but I'm hoping it will be interesting for at least some of that time, being somewhat outside of my experience.

The Bar mitzvah is a Jewish coming of age ceremony conducted when a boy reaches thirteen, the boy in this case being Noah, one of Junior's classmates from school. Bess wears heels and a sober dress. Junior and myself are in our suits and ties, and as we enter the synagogue we are each given a red satin yamulke with which to cover our heads as a gesture of respect; just like in the films, I think to myself.

The ceremony is indeed three-hours long as promised, possibly a little over, and - against all odds - remains engrossing throughout. Much of it seems to be based around readings from the Torah, specifically the story of Noah, the one who famously built the boat rather than the thirteen-year old boy stood up front. It occurs to me that Noah the child has probably had thirteen years of jokes about boats, rain, and judicious animal pairings, and might legitimately roll his eyes at some point; but he doesn't, and the more personal testimonials of the morning suggest that he's been looking forward to this day for a long time, even approaching his Rabbi without having been pushed to ask how soon he can get to learning as much as he can of the ceremony; and weirdly, I'm beginning to understand why.

The ceremony is conducted by Rabbi Abraham, reading or else addressing the congregation and talking us through it all, and Hazzan Lipton, who sings verses from the Torah entirely in Yiddish, unaccompanied by any instrument because his voice itself is enough. The role of the Hazzan is to sing, to lead the congregation in prayer. Wikipedia insists there is an equivalent in the Christian church, but I guess not one that does either weddings or funerals, those being more or less the extent of my own involvement with the same. I have encountered music in churches here in Texas, and thus far it has been uniformly terrible - twee modern hymns trying far too hard set to twanging rhinestone-laden country and western, either from compact disc played far too loud through a tinny PA or a live cabaret band. Taking pleasure from music in a place of worship is a new one on me and it catches me out. I find it strange to hear a human voice, loud and clear in the cavernous space of a place of worship, and to hear it unalloyed by instrumentation. The words are Hebrew, and the notation is very clearly Middle-Eastern - reminding me that Judaism and Islam have more in common than we generally acknowledge - and it is very, very powerful. I wonder if I'm having one of those religious experiences you always hear about. I suppose in some sense I am.

We're up and down every few minutes, sitting or standing according to which seems appropriate, and we follow along in hymn books and copies of the Torah with pages ordered in reverse to that with which I am familiar. Each page contains the Yiddish text rendered in both Hebrew and the Arabic script of our own alphabet, then a phonetic rendering which even I am able to follow, with extensive notes elsewhere on the page. The notes are what I find the most interesting, being an insight into a religious system which I realise I really don't know at all. The notes explain that some of what we're hearing expresses good wishes upon humanity as a whole, regardless of faith. Other notes question the various means by which certain verses have been interpreted during the centuries since they were written, and one passage refers to Judaism seemingly never having quite reached a conclusion regarding the possibility of an afterlife. I could be mistaken, but Judaism is beginning to look a lot like a faith which does what a faith should do, actively legislates against becoming an exclusive club, and isn't afraid to admit that it doesn't know everything or that some of those tales may be allegorical. All this and the music is great too.

At some point the Torah is revealed in the form of a book written upon scrolls, held within the ark at the rear wall of the synagogue, and ceremony is made of bringing out the Torah and taking it around the room. Eventually we come to Noah himself and the vows and wishes expressed for his future, with some of those wishes expressed specifically as boiled sweets thrown at him by the congregation. We've been prepared for this by the Rabbi and his aides handing out said sweets with a forceful request that we throw them gently, preferably using an underarm technique. I momentarily envision a thirteen-year old boy concussed by a well-aimed toffee apple at his own Bar mitzvah, which thankfully doesn't happen.

For two hours or more we've been listening to words sung in another language and somehow I'm still not bored. In fact I'm enjoying this far more than anticipated. It's pleasant, civilised, and characterised entirely by charitable sentiments unto others. The contrast is dramatic when I think of those terrible country and western ceremonies, and the Quinceañera in which the priest spent a good hour delivering a speech about how we're going to hear all sorts of disgusting lies told about the Catholic church by those outside the Catholic church and that we should ignore such disgusting liars and the disgusting lies they tell about the Catholic church because it's all lies, I tell you! All lies...

We turn to our neighbours to shake hands and wish them shabbat shalom. I guess we're in the Goyim stalls and I think the woman behind us may be a Hindu, which swells my wishy-washy liberal heart because I like to think that we humans have more in common with each other than not, and that's what today seems to be about, at least in part. I also get to shake the hand of Hazzan Lipton seeing as he's doing the rounds, so I tell him he has an amazing voice because he really has.

Noah reads from the Torah and further blessings are given before we meet the parents. His father is originally from New Jersey, one of those big bear guys whom you see and immediately like, sort of gruff but strong and with a kind face.

'Now it's my turn,' he announces ominously as he takes the microphone. He's the guy who paid for all of this, which he acknowledges in keeping with humorous tradition in some comment about the venue's next ceremony being a funeral to be held for his bank account. Laughter in church is another new thing for me, excepting the uncomfortable, nervous variety.

There is food to follow, so we file out three hours or more after we first took our seats, and fill plates with bagels, salad, salmon, capers, and cream cheese. Junior runs off to compare notes with his friends, and we listen to a fellow guest, a Latino guy who has recently converted to Judaism and is busily learning all that must be learned, including Hebrew. It sounds like an enormous commitment, but I find myself envying, or at least admiring him for it. Then he begins to talk about cutting off his family and having committed certain crimes he can't tell us about and I find I admire him a little less.

We leave with full hearts and full bellies, feeling touched by the spirit of something I'd never really considered. I've never really had anything you could describe as religious conviction, but I've got myself something meaningful out of this one occasion.

עֲלֵיכֶם שָׁלוֹם, as they say.

Whatever Happened to the Loki Lads?

At the time of the sun going below the earth, Fenrir son of Loki did have a great thirst upon him, and for this reason he was to be found once again drinking ale at the longhouse of Utgard in the land of Jötunheimr. In silence he watched as two serfs at the end of the hall held up a series of tableaux carved in relief upon great oak panels. The two serfs held first the one relief, then another, and then a third and yet more. Old Ganglati had seated himself at a table to one side from which he did tell the story that was seen upon those oaken panels. He shuffled his runestones and addressed all who would hear tell of the swimming match.

'Kjartan Ólafsson coming in from behind there, and King Ólafur Tryggvason sees not what is about to happen for the waters of the Vimur are still in his eyes and his vision is obscured.'

'Come on, Tryggvason,' Fenrir did mutter to himself before taking a gulp of his ale, words of encouragement for those who could not hear him. 'Come on, son.'

The serfs set down their relief and took another from the pile for to show the guests of the longhouse. The tableau showed Ólafsson pressing down upon the crown of his opponent, ducking him into the waters as Ganglati continued to give account.

'We've seen the king in this position before and it would be only a fool that would decree so soon an end to this match.'

'Hello, Fenrir. I thought I might find you in here.' The words were spoken by the serpent Jörmungandr who had come in from the cold of the ice and snow, for it was still upon his brow and his shoulders, and his face wore the look of an unhappy dog. 'Can I get you anything?'

Fenrir raised a hand to silence his brother, for this seemed a critical moment in the relating of the swimming match. In truth, he did not even set eye upon his brother, for he was so rapt.

'I'll take that as a no then, shall I?' Jörmungandr shook his head and sat himself down upon the bench, whereupon the serving-maid Ganglöt did attend to him. 'What do you fancy this evening,  Jörmungandr?'

'It's nice of you to offer, Ganglöt,' Jörmungandr smiled, 'but I think I'll stick to the ale if it's all the same.'

Ganglöt did giggle in a most pleasing manner, and then went away to fetch an ale, and so the serpent did turn his attention to the swimming match as related by means of oaken panel and the testimony of old Ganglati. 'I expect the king will be up against Eirik of Oprustader in the play-offs.'

For the first time, Fenrir drew his eyes from the tableau of the oaken panels to set them upon his brother with a gaze measured equally in restraint and warlike intent.

Jörmungandr gulped, understanding the fullness of his error. 'I mean if he wins, of course.'

Fenrir did then speak but his words were so quiet as to be unheard, their import revealed only in the sour furrow of his brow and the vigour with which he then drained his vessel of ale.

Jörmungandr set forth a smile with some caution. 'Well, you wolfed that down!'

'Very funny.' Fenrir took a carved token from within his robe of the kind serving as a stake to those who enjoy the sport of gambling, and he snapped it in two pieces in a spirit of disgust. No more did he attend to the speech of old Ganglati who did now give account of the victory of King Ólafur Tryggvason as his aides held aloft a wooden panel carved with a tableau of the same.

At that moment the serving-maid Ganglöt returned from the barrel with a great vessel of ale which she set before Jörmungandr, and as Jörmungandr took his first refreshing mouthful, a voice was heard, fluting and fussy like that of a woman.

'So this is where you've got to. You'll spoil your dinner, you know. I thought you said you were coming straight home.'

The words did cause great surprise to Jörmungandr who spluttered as his eyes became most wide and he did spray a froth of ale forth upon the table.

'Hello Gullveig,' said Fenrir to the woman who had spoken the words, then adding a diplomatic 'pet,' as though the endearment were an afterthought.

The woman Gullveig, betrothed of Jörmungandr, stood at the side of the table regarding these two sons of Loki with a certain measure of disdain, although she had not forgotten her manners and returned Fenrir's greeting accordingly, and in doing so, noted that he was without ale for the serving-maid Ganglöt had taken away his vessel. She turned then to her betrothed and said through lips drawn tight as the fundament of a scared man, 'Well, at least it's nice to see that your brother doesn't need to get drunk to enjoy himself. You should take a leaf out of his book, Jörmungandr.'

At that moment the serving-maid Ganglöt set another large vessel of ale down before Fenrir, who rubbed his hands together, licked his lips, and said, 'lovely. Thank you, Ganglöt.'

Gullveig rolled her eyes and looked up towards the rafters of the longhouse as though seeking fortification from above. 'Jörmungandr,' she began, 'you do remember that your uncle Thor is coming over for dinner this evening?'

'How could I have forgotten?' Jörmungandr spoke with a bitter tone, being well aware of the appointment, and finding himself less than happy at having been reminded. Swiftly he drained his vessel then called out to Ganglöt that she should bring him another. Noticing that his betrothed now regarded him with displeasure he submitted a diplomatic smile and told her, 'Holtland courage, dearest. You've said yourself how much he does go on.'

A great crack of thunder could be heard splitting the heavens all across the land of Jötunheimr. It was like a great bell which sounded within the building and all who were present felt it beneath their feet.

'Silly old sod,' said Fenrir with feeling.

Jörmungandr rolled his eyes, clearly thinking that his point had been illustrated very well.

'All the same,' Gullveig protested, 'he's your uncle, and it's your job we're thinking about, so it would be nice if I weren't the only one making an effort.' Her eyes did then seem heavy with dew as though she would soon burst forth with tears. 'And we still need to replace the mat in the guest bedroom after your father's little accident, and Berit will soon be closing up shop for the evening. I mean what are you going to tell Thor if he asks about the mess?'

'I'll tell him Loki had one too many when he came to stay at Jul, and I'm sure he'll be able to work out the rest for himself. You can hardly see the stain and they are brothers, you know? Sometimes you seem to think I'm made of mats.'

'Don't be so silly, Jörmungandr. I just want us to make the right impression is all.'

Jörmungandr's head sank forward so that it was upon the table.

Gullveig pursed her lips in the manner of a duck or some other water bird. 'Can I trust you to pick something up from Berit's hut and hurry home once you've had your drink?'

'Yes, darling,' said Jörmungandr with his face still pressed to the wood of the table as though conceding defeat to a powerful enemy.

'Never mind buying a mat,' Fenrir quipped in dour spirit as Gullveig took her leave of the longhouse, 'she believes that you are one! A door mat!'

At that very moment, the lur-horn did sound, played by old Ganglati to formally conclude his account of the swimming match. He blew four descending and mournful notes upon the instrument, with the last drawn out longer than the others, and it did seem to all as though the music made mock of Jörmungandr's sorry lot.

Atheist Heaven

Atheist Heaven was what I should have renamed the internet bulletin board for which I served as administrator a few years ago. It was Carl's suggestion. We were speaking on the telephone and I could hear him struggling to breath as he rocked with silent laughter at the notion of Atheist Heaven. I liked it because it was funny and I knew it would annoy the more humourless members of the board. In the end they went for Thinking Universe, adopting a banner which showed an image of a spiral galaxy embellished with a thought bubble like you might see in a Popeye cartoon. It wasn't the worst name they could have come up with, but I thought the banner revealed a certain lack of imagination. Look, the universe is having a think!, which caused me to have a think about 1970s pub rock bands releasing albums with hopelessly literal artwork - the cover of Rockin' in the Jungle inevitably depicting band members going at their instruments in safari suits or else dressed as gorillas against a backdrop of plastic palm trees.

I'd resisted the internet for many years, but took the plunge around the beginning of 2006 after protracted nagging from my girlfriend. She didn't have internet access but wanted a relationship with someone who did - she explained testily - so as to save her the trouble of using the computers up at the library. She promised that my proposed internet access would give her a reason to visit me, which was of course very flattering.

At the time my principle interests were Mesoamerica and, to a lesser extent, science, so that's what I looked for when I first got myself plumbed into the world wide web. I discovered bulletin boards and found they served in part as a reasonable substitute for the social life I didn't quite have. There was Archaeologica, which touched upon several of my areas of interest. It was okay, but began to feel a little slow and dry after a while, and I found myself increasingly irritated by the received wisdom of mainstream archaeology as a secretive club which strives to keep the truth from the rest of us so as to save money on having to get all those archaeology textbooks rewritten and reprinted.

The Richard Dawkins board wasn't actually much better, but it was busier and they had an off-topic section where the more scatologically inclined users could discuss whatever they felt like discussing. Usually this was inconsequential shite of a puerile nature - what you had for breakfast, how much you hate Noel Edmonds, worse job you ever had, biggest poo you ever done did and so on. As with most inconsequential shite of a puerile nature, you probably had to be there. Richard Dawkins himself tended not to be there very much, apparently having assumed that most of those signed up to his bulletin board would spend their time politely discussing protons or how God is just like Father Christmas. Unfortunately, the one day upon which Richard Dawkins had some time off from splicing genomes, the one day when he happened to be there, was also the day when someone started a thread entitled Ass to Mouth or similar for discussion of a sexual act which seems more tailored to the composition of appalling jokes than to actual intimate pleasure as I would recognise it.

Richard Dawkins read Ass to Mouth, wisps of smoke trailing furiously from his ears, then deleted a whole load of similarly scatological threads and banned those responsible, not wanting his name in any way associated with the discussion of bums in a supposedly recreational capacity. I can't say this ever struck me as either surprising or even particularly unreasonable, but others using the bulletin board had much stronger feelings, having put a lot of work into Ass to Mouth and now suspecting that this virtual pogrom represented a violation of their freedom of speech, possibly even their basic human rights. About three-hundred members of the Richard Dawkins board therefore took their custom elsewhere, specifically to the Thinking Aloud forum as set up by Sid's Snake. The three-hundred included those who had been banned from Richard Dawkins' board; those who had left as a show of solidarity with those banned and who now didst go forth unto the wilderness seeking a bulletin board which wasn't quite so much like NAZI GERMANY; and persons such as myself who went along following the trail of chuckles, and who had never really been so fascinated by protons that we felt the need to argue about them with complete strangers.

Sid's Snake turned out to be some hairy metal guy from northern California, a couple of years younger than myself and who took photographs of the rock group Kiss for a living - or something like that. He was, in addition, a proclaimed atheist with an interest in science and all that good stuff, and he'd set up Thinking Aloud in anticipation of Richard Dawkins losing his rag and suddenly expelling a whole load of potty-mouthed angels from his virtual creation. In case it isn't obvious, I've substituted the names of those involved with those of characters from Whizzer & Chips comic because it's amusing to me, and I don't really feel like identifying any of the fuckers, having no desire to resume communications with them; so let us, for the sake of argument, work with the notion that Thinking Aloud was set up by Sid's Snake.

Thinking Aloud was fun for a while, if possibly somewhat impenetrable to outsiders due to the rise of small cliques of users with their own inscrutable sets of in-jokes, which seemed to be reflected in favouritism on the part of the moderators - those granted administrative powers to police the forum so as to prevent anyone engaging in cunty behaviour. Inevitably, as with any environment in which a certain percentage of the population take themselves far too seriously, after about six months there was a schism. Odd Ball had been banned for being a bit of an argumentative tosspot. Protests were made suggesting that with the expulsion of Odd Ball, the forum had become too much like NAZI GERMANY and Sid's Snake was actually a lot like Adolf Hitler when you thought about it, so Sid's Snake banned those involved. This was apparently exactly what Hitler would have done. Luckily Sweet Tooth had anticipated Sid's Snake losing the plot and had spent the previous months setting up yet another forum called Rationalia, so everyone went there instead.

I posted on Rationalia for a little while, but never really took to the place. The repeated schisms seemed to have generated a more concentrated strain of self-important atheist - unless they had always been that way and I'd simply never noticed. The atmosphere of the forum was jovial but often with a suggestion of the passive-aggressive, a nastily Darwinian undercurrent, like hanging out with a hyaena-pack of public schoolboys all waiting for you to say something stupid or to reveal some hitherto unsuspected weakness, but for now biding their time with knob gags or by quoting Monty Python and Douglas fucking Adams zingers at one another. Minnie's Mixer quipped that Rationalia was like a cross between 4Chan and the Richard Dawkins forum, which was I suppose her version of you don't have to be crazy to work here, but it helps!, missing the point that 4Chan - a famously unmoderated image board - was at least occasionally funny, and Rationalia was mostly droning middle-class liberals with a pathological need to be right about something or other sat around agreeing what fine sport it was to scoff at Christians, to engage them in debate and make them cry. This was the point at which I no longer had any desire to call myself an atheist, specifically when it was asked how more chew toys might be drawn to the forum, chew toys being religious persons who might be induced to sign up and then bullied into either renouncing their faith or giving up and slinking off to general cries of victory, gloating, and congratulating ourselves on our magnificent rationality.

Additionally, possibly because God is dead with morality and even personal responsibility an illusion, the forum developed an unpleasantly sexualised undercurrent, allegedly expressed in an inner sanctum apparently modelled on back issues of Reader's Wives, driving at least some of the membership away. It was all very 1960s. Newly signed up and hypothetically female users - so far as it was possible to tell on the internet - were invited to post photos of their tits on at least a couple of occasions; but apparently that was just high spirits and anyway the hypothetical women hadn't minded so it was all okay. If anything, they had probably enjoyed the lively jocularity of the exchange. The suggestion that the forum had turned into a virtual knocking shop was deftly countered with arguments amounting to if you think the board has developed an overtly sexual tone then you're very wrong because the board hasn't developed an overtly sexual tone.

Brilliant.

I drifted back to Thinking Aloud which by this point was down to a regular membership of around three, excepting Rationalians nipping back to save HTML copies of ye olde precious threads which had been crafted by their own fair hands, the virtual artifacts which must be saved that future generations might benefit from the wisdom of Sexy or Salad Dodger? and its like. I had initially mistaken casual speculation about how one day someone might make a film about our little corner of the internet for sarcasm, but no, some of these people genuinely seemed to believe we were kind of important in the great scheme of things, if not the three-hundred, then we Atheists; or we friendly rabid atheists, as the Rationalia strapline had it.

Ha ha.

You don't have to be mad to work here... but it helps!

Back at Thinking Aloud, Sid's Snake had recruited a couple of his real life stoner buddies to make the place look busy, but you could tell they didn't really give a shit about atheism, science, the internet, or saying anything funny. Still, Sid's Snake had an idea. He was going to buy an existing atheist bulletin board and merge it with Thinking Aloud. I suppose having put some amount of work into the forum, he just couldn't let it go. He seemed to have a vision where the place was concerned. It sounded like a reasonable idea at the time. For all of its faults, I'd still enjoyed Thinking Aloud significantly more than any other internet forum of which I'd been a member, and I hadn't yet quite seen the appeal of facebook, so that was my virtual social life, or as good as. We had a look at a few other thematically-similar boards, mostly populated with humourless bores and thus entirely unsuitable for assimilation. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own, we suggested helpfully. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile, but they weren't having it, so the search continued, at least until we discovered Atheist Nation.

Atheist Nation had been set up by some guy called Robert a few years before, but Robert had become a born again Christian and had understandably lost interest in the board, which would therefore cease to exist when his last payment to the host or the server or however it worked ran out. Sid's Snake made him an offer, and Robert said yes.

Where the three-hundred seemed predominantly English Grauniad reading middle-class with just a soupçon of debate conducted by means of hilarious references to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - as an admittedly broad generalisation - Atheist Nation was comprised of generally younger members, mostly American and working class or at least blue collar, many of whom significantly regarded Richard Dawkins as a bit of a dick. If the Rationalia branch of atheism was a chance for a jolly interesting debate with the pleasure of getting to be right about something, over and over, for Atheist Nation it seemed more like a means of staying sane, particularly for those poor fuckers representing the lone voice not asking Jesus for a new car, job, or pair of tits in some terrifying Baptist backwater. Additionally, Atheist Nation had a few severely ornery types - as we say in Texas - as part of the equation, persons virtually incapable of turning on the computer without upsetting somebody, but it made for a less predictable and slightly more dynamic virtual environment than Rationalia's evolving festival of self-congratulation and cosily, familiar jokes.

The merging of one temporarily vacant bulletin board with the populace of another was a success in some respects, although not everyone was happy about it, this being the internet. Fuss Pot, possibly one of the most boring women ever to set people straight on social media, had been a moderator at Atheist Nation when it first started and had since found herself amongst the three-hundred. Now she returned to Thinking Aloud to protest the violation of basic human rights of Atheist Nation members. Wait until Robert hears about this, she raged righteously, unaware of Robert having found Jesus due to the fact of her not having given two shits about Atheist Nation for the previous five years. Sid's Snake was exactly like Adolf Hitler, she bravely protested in the spirit of Che Guevara, John Lennon, and one of those monks who sets himself on fire.

I could really do without this, I suggested to her, pointing out that Atheist Nation had been a sinking ship at the time of its assimilation, and that she was talking bollocks as usual.

If you don't like the drama, you should have thought about that before you became an admin, she typed righteously, ignoring my actual point, possibly simultaneously shouting at the computer screen; so that was me told.

The new improved Thinking Aloud began to settle. Those for whom the merge had been a step in the wrong direction drifted away, and a core group of regular posters established itself, remaining  stable for a year or two in so much as any form of social media ever remains stable. We had about five or six moderators, and the key to the board's success, if any of it can be termed successful, seems to have been that Sid's Snake had apparently learned his lesson and had taken a back seat in terms of running the place. He posted from time to time and he made suggestions, but he spent most of his day concentrating on some other related project, something he wasn't telling us about.

Months passed and it dawned on me that I'd never really wanted to serve as admin on an atheist bulletin board, having originally stepped in on the understanding of it being a temporary thing; and part of the problem was that I don't like atheists, or at least I tend to dislike people with a strong need to identify as atheist.

It comes down to basic manners. I myself have never had any strongly religious belief and could therefore most likely be considered atheist by some definition, but I don't see an absence of belief in something as a defining, interesting, or even useful characteristic any more than I would my promote my lifelong hatred of kedgeree as indicative of culinary credentials. That which drew me to atheist bulletin boards in the first place was mostly science and knob gags rather than a desire to discuss my not believing in something; and this has been particularly so since Atheism has become a cause in its own right and, in terms of social media, a stick with which to beat others over the head.

I understand why, as a rallying cry to those disaffected, declared atheism might seem a necessary means of combating the rise of extremist and fundamentalist religions, but is it really? When was the last time hitting anyone over the head with an essay and calling them a fucking idiot made any difference other than cementing them more firmly to whatever screwy convictions you were hoping to dissolve? So if it's all just pissing into the wind, what are we left with if not net-dwelling antisocials who are only able to elevate themselves by pushing down on someone else? It's not so much that atheists are inherently dull as that there's not much joy to be had from anyone who is able to discuss only one thing, particularly when that one thing is how they don't believe in something with such vigour that they're prepared to regard even the slightest variance of opinion as essentially cunty. Additionally, as Lewis Black has pointed out, you can usually tell a fanatic by their lack of a sense of humour, a definition I would expand to encompass the same old show us your tits jokes and Python quotes year after year after year on the grounds that simple repetition should never be confused with actual wit.

So specifically Atheist opinion expressed on social media has, in my experience, tended to fall into one of a fairly limited number of categories. Whilst whistles blown upon religious idiocy such as - for one example - Charles Darwin nudged out of the biology textbooks by educational systems which feel somehow bound to respect the views of drooling morons, are certainly to be commended, I've never felt it useful to start screaming about irrationality when dealing with inherently irrational people; and the problem is surely not so much their idiocy as the existence of a system in which their idiocy is granted currency. So most campaigning against religiously-inspired tomfoolery tends to take the form of don't you think this is terrible?! and serves mainly to consolidate a consensus view of yes, this is terrible without making the slightest difference to anyone but those nodding their heads and patting each other on the back over how much more enlightened they are than hilarious yokels from rural Arkansas or wherever. Nothing progressive is achieved, least of all communication, and most likely because it can be quite difficult to communicate with a person once you've likened them to a drooling thirteenth-century serf whilst channelling Terry Thomas.

Come to think of it, most specifically Atheist opinion that I've seen expressed on social media has amounted to don't you think this is terrible?! The aforementioned Fuss Pot had very little else to say, whether it was her suspiciously anti-Semitic campaign to have some hundred year-old carved image of a menora removed from a public building - because yeah, that one was a real violation of human rights - or her bravely facebooking of statistics demonstrating that gun ownership is most prevalent in areas of the United States with a high incidence of religious fundamentalism, because wow - who would have fucking thunk it, eh?

A survey conducted by somebody or other inspired a thread on Thinking Aloud seriously suggesting that Atheists are now the most persecuted minority in the United States. Whether true or not, the survey struck me as more to do with the adopted victim mentality of persons such as Fuss Pot who, like all good vessels of middle class guilt, tend to need to distract from their own privilege by expressing either solidarity with, or suffering parallel to that of those actually getting their front doors kicked in at two in the morning by angry retards. I tried to point this out on the forum, but the response was something along the lines of oh - so you think it's a good thing that children as young as six months are being raped by priests? You think that's a good thing, do you? You think that's fine?

This is about as much sense as I've ever had from persons who feel the need to introduce themselves as Atheist, those for whom not doing something is a defining quality. Of course, I can understand it up to a point, and I agree with a fair amount of what is written in Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion, and I'm keen on the separation of church and state guaranteed by the constitution of my recently adopted homeland; but I don't believe anything reduced to black and white arguments of good and evil is ever helpful; and I don't believe that calling people delusional is ever conducive to meaningful dialogue, no matter how crazy they may be; because, in case no-one noticed, that's what the other lot have been doing all along and that's why we don't really like them. There are plenty of problems in the world without inventing new ones such as Atheists as a persecuted minority, and none of those problems will be addressed by don't you think this is terrible?!, or by further disenfranchising the opposition with divisions bearing a suspicious resemblance to lines once defined by class; and on a more personal note - or at least one more directly pertinent to my own private obsessions - there's probably not much point taking any kind of interest in human history, art, or even science if you're driven by some pathological need to divide everything up into rational and irrational whilst presuming the latter to comprise essentially useless information. If, for example, your understanding of mythology can be reduced to it's all superstitious innit, then what you have isn't really an understanding.

Thinking Aloud seemed to work better in its Atheist Nation phase, at least from where I was stood, and specifically because there was no unifying cause behind which we were all expected to rally, and no-one who gave a shit about Douglas fucking Adams. Occasionally a new member would sign up and make the increasingly familiar introductory post about Jesus being non-rational nonsense that is not rational and has no reason and is nonsense and is logically irrational, apparently expecting a virtual round of applause; or a patently crazy individual identified as Dennis Markuze would post bizarre and lengthy attacks promising all you little atheists are gonna get your heads cut off which we immediately deleted; but mostly the board ambled along and looked after itself.

Unfortunately this wasn't quite enough for Sid's Snake. He had a vision of something bigger, and he was never entirely happy about the way things were, the posting habits of the forum membership or our general lack of manners - which admittedly also pissed me off from time to time. Sid's Snake had vowed to maintain a strictly advisory role, suggesting rather than intervening because he'd learned his lesson and you guys are doing an amazing job without me. This didn't quite work as promised because every time he advisoried something which the rest of us failed to implement on the grounds of it being a terrible idea, he just went ahead and did it anyway.

He seemed to be getting more and more involved, despite promises to the contrary, because it turned out he had been working on a much larger project, a social media site called Evolving Hub, or at least that was one of a number of fairly uninspiring names. The most ludicrous was probably Symbiant Minds, whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. It was going to be bigger than facebook, and Thinking Aloud would be just one small part of it; and I presume this must have been back before the advent of some new piece of shit social media crap which will be bigger than facebook was a more or less daily occurrence. Evolving Hub would be for like-minded people who don't like Jesus, and possibly even for some who don't mind him that much. We could blog on Evolving Hub, post pictures, have a network of friends, and keep all of our different bulletin boards open in different windows, and there would be something called the Pink Pages if we wanted to organise orgies of like-minded consenting rationalists, and Thinking Aloud would be somewhere in there too but Jesus, you guys really need to get the place under control. The problem was that Sid's Snake saw himself as some kind of benevolent social media Buddha smiling benignly down upon his grateful minions as we sat around politely discussing rational shit or arguing over which Judas Priest album was the most awesome, but it was never going to happen because Sid's Snake didn't actually seem to like people, and he never understood when they failed to behave according to his vision.

Becoming increasingly frustrated with us, and with threads which failed to resemble transcripts of discussion at the Oxford University Debating Society, Sid's Snake started up a new forum and began to invite us over to take a look around. There were a lot more rules and it mostly seemed to comprise sections he'd proposed for Thinking Aloud which we'd either rejected as too lame or had tried and then rejected when no-one took the slightest bit of interest. It began to feel as though we were dealing with a stoner version of Captain Mainwaring.

I spoke to him on the phone a couple of times, transatlantic calls made at his request so we could discuss the future of the place. There was a lot of hey in there, also man and dude and the rest, and I suspect there were a couple of times when he was actually calling from inside a bong; but he never really made much sense, and I could never tell what the point of the call had been.

He paid me a few hundred dollars to revise and rewrite the text of facebook's terms of use so as to avoid copyright problems when he added it to the Evolving Hub small print, this sort of shite:

Like most websites, we maintain an access log which includes IP address information. This is done for our security and yours. These logs are deleted from the server periodically, but we make no specific guarantees about their longevity. We reserve the right to log IPs at any time. To prevent your IP address from being logged you must access the site through a proxy server. The site's functionality may be impaired when using a proxy.

I came close to slipping into a coma on a couple of occasions whilst undertaking this task. There seemed to be pages and pages of it, and he was paying me because hey, you're the writer guy - you have the way with words and shit. Evolving Hub was going to make all of us rich, so what the hell, I thought, why not? That said, I had a hunch that Evolving Hub probably wasn't going to make all of us rich, and probably wasn't even going to happen given Sid's Snake's track record of periodically pissing off everyone around him, but it wasn't like I had anything better to do.

The sadly inevitable end came when Tiny Tycoon was banned. One evening he'd been there, posting away on Thinking Aloud as usual and the next morning he was gone, and Sid's Snake had filled up my private messages inbox with requests stating that I needed to get in touch and to back him up on this one. We had to present a united front.

First it was claimed that Tiny Tycoon had been redecorating our precious forum with the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer. Then he'd actually just been providing links to a popular kiddy-fiddling site on our precious forum. Then he'd been providing links to 4Chan on our precious forum, which Sid's Snake insisted was a popular kiddy-fiddling site. When after half a morning of this I finally got to the truth, and it turned out that Tiny Tycoon had simply mentioned 4Chan in some thread or other, and had mentioned it because he'd recently looked at the place, decided it was horrible, and was telling the rest of us to avoid it like the plague. He hadn't provided a link and it wasn't the sort of site Sid's Snake had claimed it to be through a haze of weed smoke.

I gave Sid's Snake a call. He was raving. He sounded as though he was channelling William Shatner's acting. I explained that I had lifted the ban on Tiny Tycoon because the guy hadn't done anything wrong, and he certainly hadn't been attempting to promote  pornography of any description, and we probably owed him an apology. Sid's Snake went into a rant predicated on the understanding that I'd never heard of 4Chan, had no idea what it was, and hadn't actually said any of the things I had just said to him.

I set him straight. 'Yes, I've seen 4Chan, thank you. It's an image board without much in the way of moderation, and I'm not a big fan of the place either. Sometimes that sort of thing gets posted there and it might be up for ten minutes or so before somebody removes it and the person responsible is blocked, so what you're worried about is down to members rather than the site itself. It's no more pornographic than Thinking Aloud or any other forum. Somebody could post that stuff at our place, and we'd remove it and ban them. That doesn't make us Gary Glitter. Do you see what I'm saying here?'

He didn't. 'I've seen a picture on 4Chan where a fifty year-old dude has his [description of something you don't really need to think about], so do you think that's okay? Is that the sort of thing you think we should be linking on Thinking Aloud? Do you think that's cool? Would you like to see that on our forum? Would you? Would you? Would you like to see that? That stuff is okay by you, is it?'

I pointed out that no-one had provided links to anything of the sort, but I was wasting my time. I listened to another ten minutes of the same shit over and over and then put the phone down on him. Never trust a hippie, I reminded myself. I should never have let myself forget that one.

Sid's Snake engaged us in the staff room - a private area of the forum visible only to moderators - us being myself and the seven or eight other members of Thinking Aloud staff at the time. He stuck to his story regardless of the suspicious deletion of the supposedly offending material, the terrible thread in which Tiny Tycoon had posted the kind of pornography which Gary Glitter had on his computer, or provided a link to a source of the same, or not actually done any of these things. No agreement was reached, no admission of error or possible misinterpretation on the part of Sid's Snake, not even an acknowledgment of how many times he'd changed his story;  and at last I understood why most of the three-hundred had ended up hating the cunt.

He vanished from the forum and from our lives. Thinking Aloud continued with a few murmurs about buying the place from our drug-addled mentor, but it never came to anything and then without a word he pulled the plugs. A few of the others got to work on what became known as Thinking Universe, yet another breakaway bulletin board, and the Evolving Hub empire never happened; and I came to realise that on reflection I don't really like bulletin boards, or the sort of people who habitually hang around on them, or people who need to be right, or who need to belong to an exclusive club or a cult of any kind. It turned out that I already had friends, at least as many as I could possibly need, people who had been there all along even if it wasn't always obvious. Some of them even have views on religious or other matters which differ quite significantly from my own, because that's how the world works, despite the opinions of anyone who might wish it were otherwise.

Everything is Now

Texas is like heaven so far as I'm concerned, or at least an afterlife. This strikes even me as a peculiar claim, but it's the best, most succinct way I have of describing my daily existence since I moved here in relation to the previous years. Everything has worked out. Everything is different and still seems fresh in comparison to what I have been used to, and this impression is reinforced even by details so small as the weeds in my garden being plants I would not have recognised before 2011. I'm no longer moving forward with the certainty of a dark future which will inevitably become more difficult than the present, as was once the case. Additionally - present company excepted - everyone I have known with any degree of intimacy over the course of my first five decades now lives in a different country - all simplified to telephone numbers, facebook accounts or email addresses - communications across a great divide; and thanks to the advent of the internet, it almost is everyone I have known because these days they're all out there somewhere - people from school or work, remote family members, those I haven't seen in thirty years, persons with whom I never had any real reason to keep in touch, much as I would have liked.

Whilst I haven't always kept a diary, I've tried from time to time, and even when there's been no regular nightly scribbling to give account of the day, I've been in the habit of documentation, keeping notes of dates which seemed significant, holding onto letters and so on, because I like to see where I've been and because it helps me to better understand the present. Once I had learned to write well enough to compose a paragraph without wincing at it the next morning, I began to maintain a weekly blog, part of which incorporated my setting down events of previous years, childhood and so on, partially for the sake of preserving what memories I have retained before my brain deteriorates, partially for chuckles, and partially because I am unusually fascinating by my own progress from birth to the present day. The great majority of these memoirs - as I'm reluctant to term them - now seem like things which happened to someone else, so I'm not sure whether that makes me particularly vain or simply ordinary. Since 2011, I've been composing my autobiography right here, albeit in no particular order and without quite having set out to do so.

Further to this endeavour, in 2013 I dug out the diaries written between 1977 and 1986 and began transcribing the material into a single document on my word processor, initially for the sake of clarifying a few ambiguous dates but also in order to excavate further material upon which to expand in one of these essays. The diaries are patchy and only a few of them keep going right to the end of the year, but I've supplemented this material with more recent autobiographical notes and general whining recorded in sketchbooks or as part of emails, and with transcriptions of tape letters spoken onto cassette and sent to my friend Tim Griffiths throughout the nineties; because, suspecting I might one day wish to hear my droning twenty-five-year old self going on about fave bands and how depressed I've been, I of course made copies of these tape letters for my own archive. So I now have a year by year electronic document amounting to my life story since the age of eleven - albeit with a few gaps - which has taken me two years to compile and which concludes in postmodern fashion with emails describing my intent to compile said document - like a life flashing before my eyes, albeit slowly.

At this juncture I should probably point out that none of the above constitutes satire, although I won't be offended if you can't be arsed to read on.

Anyway, I'm now approaching the end of what I've termed my diary project, which is something of a relief. It's been a mammoth undertaking in certain respects, and undoubtedly a vain one, but I've found it interesting, and surprising and depressing, and comforting in so much as it allows me to state with some confidence that I'm no longer an arsehole, or no longer quite such an arsehole, or at the very least I am a different kind of arsehole to the person whose over-extended obituary I appear to have been writing. Whilst it's nice to have accessed my own past, I'm happy that I no longer live there as protracted exposure gets a bit much after a while. This undertaking has additionally reinforced the notion that I am in heaven, because everything is now and the past has been reduced to a different region of the present.

Over the course of transcribing diary material, I've inevitably come across the names of many people I had forgotten, and in most cases I've had a look on the internet to see if they can still be found, where they are and what they're doing now. It's not exactly nostalgia, but sometimes it's just nice to know that a certain person is still alive or even that they haven't turned into a complete wanker. Inevitably I've shared facebook gigabytes - or whatever the thing is made of - with almost everyone I knew at school as well as some I didn't know thanks to Friends Reunited; and most of them have turned out pretty decent, and there are a good few with whom I'm very glad to be back in touch after all this time.

Then there are the more intriguing names from the diaries - Penny White for one. I have no memory of her, nor even what she looked like, and yet I fancied her something rotten for at least six months of my school days according to what I wrote at the time. When finally I located a blurred photograph of her on a friend's facebook page, a photograph taken back when I knew her, the face rang not a solitary bell. This amnesia struck me as slightly alarming and strengthened my resolve to complete the diary project in as much detail as could be mustered.

Sometimes the retrieval operation has bitten me in the ass. Hampton Cockwomble* didn't remember me at all but accepted my friend request on facebook regardless. I remembered him fairly well as a funny kid from college in Stratford specialising in an hilarious impersonation of the crap robot from Buck Rogers culminating with Bedeep bedeep bedeep! Get your kecks off, Wilma. You probably had to be there, and I was. Sadly in 2015 his facebook page proved less amusing, being concerned mostly with Lads vs. Dads golf tournaments, whatever the hell those might be, and lazy memes promoting casual racism - Oi, Cameron! Give money to our starving OAPS not illegal Muzzies and related toss. I did my best to ignore it until he shared a scan of an official government document showing how your average illegal immigrant receives ₤32,000 per annum in free benefits from the English government whilst your average English pensioner can expect less than half that figure even if they fought in three world wars. The fact that it had official British government document written across the top failed to convince me that it hadn't just been knocked up by some wanker who'd recently learned how to make tables on his word processor. Additionally, I suspected that these statistics had probably been made up because they presented such a stark contrast to the actual direct experience I'd had of the immigrant community when I was a postman delivering mail to a refugee centre in Dulwich. I pointed this out and received a fairly predictable response from one of Hampton's buddies about how I must be an unusually well informed postman - which I expect was sarcasm of a sort - and how she'd prefer to trust the evidence of her own eyes, eyes which were looking directly at an official British government document posted on the facebook page of a man who competes in  Lads vs. Dads golf tournaments, thank you very much.

It was a waste of time, I realised. I defriended Hampton, preferring to remember him as an amusing impersonation of the crap robot from Buck Rogers. Sometimes there are good reasons why you lose touch with people.

Naturally I failed to learn anything from this encounter, and found myself similarly bewildered and intrigued by my own lost past when transcribing passages of an audio letter dated to Sunday the 28th of April, 1991 on which I told Tim Griffiths:

Things on the women front haven't really changed a lot in, well - the last seven years if I'm to be honest. I don't know. I feel like I should make an effort, but I'm beginning to not care about it really. Sometimes I feel a bit sad. I find I can't make a great deal of effort. I get too embarrassed. I tell you what, there's a really nice woman on my walk in Catford at the moment. Her name is Hillsborough Oxycodone*. She's tiny and possibly Indian, and it's terrible because I just keep running into her all over the place, and she says oooh you only bring me nice letters, you're my favourite postman and so on.  As soon as I see her at the other end of the road I get this uncontrollable grin on my face. I'm going to have to have lead weights sewn into the corners of my mouth or something, which would probably be very dangerous now that I think about it; but it's this uncontrollable grin and it's dead embarrassing.

At the time I was a generally lonely individual. It was my first disorientating year living in London, and anyone who said so much as hello to me made a significant impression. I had signed for the postal route around Lushington Road in Catford, so I became a familiar face to many of the people to whom I delivered mail, and I would speak to anyone who stopped to talk because it made the job less miserable. On Sunday the 10th of November, I told Tim:

Hillsborough Oxycodone who lives on my walk kissed me recently, which was quite exciting. It wasn't that recent, come to think of it. It was some time ago. I saw her walking along so I told her that her giro had come, and asked if she wanted it because I knew where it was in the bundle of mail I was carrying.

She said, 'Oooh all right then.'

I looked through my bundles and found her giro and got it out, and she kissed me. I thought yes!!! I went bright red as well, naturally.

'Oooh, you really enjoyed that, didn't you?'

I said 'yes, I did!'

I saw her again a couple of days later and I said, 'Do you want me to have a look for your post?'

'She said, 'Oooh you're only doing it so I'll kiss you.'

I said, 'You're right there!'

Judging by my having no memory of anything else, and barely being able to remember Hillsborough herself - it having been twenty-five years ago - I assume our vague association went no further. Naturally I just had to look on facebook, and I found a woman of that name although the profile picture rang no bells. I sent a friend request and heard nothing back. Then after six months I discovered that the facebook messaging system has a spam folder into which certain messages vanish without explanation or notification as to the fact of someone having attempted to communicate with you. Hillsborough had replied way back in August:

Who are you???? You sent me a friend request yesterday you didnt reply when i asked you who you were

It was now December, so I tried to explain:

Just found your reply went into my spam folder - didn't even know there was such a thing, hence no reply. The quickest answer is that I was your postman twenty-five years ago, back when you lived in Catford. I've always kept diaries, and recently I've been going through them, and whenever I come across a name I've forgotten or someone I lost touch with, I look them up on Google or facebook just out of curiosity, so really I'm just saying hi. I don't actually remember you well, but it seems you made an impression on me at the time. You almost certainly don't remember me, but for what it's worth I'm no longer a postman, now happily married and living in Texas. Don't worry about accepting the friend request as I know it seems a bit weird, really just wanted to say hi!

She responded:

I aint never lived in catford so really dont know what your talking about

Why would you keep a diary?? Weird...... and scarey at ths same time

I should have read the warning signs but didn't:

Well then I guess I have the wrong person so just ignore me. It's not a problem. Keeping a diary really isn't that weird. Loads of people do it. Sheesh. Sorry to have bothered you.

...and so it continued in increasingly pointless circles:

You said youve always kept a diary and recently youve been going throug it if my name was in the diary then you would of rembered more about me thats what i meant

Which was followed by a friend request, which I accepted and then recognised as almost certainly having been a mistake when I found her posting rants about all you fucken white girls need to get yor won ting n fukk off you aint got no batty bitches LOOOOOOOL and a string of crying with laughter at having delivered such a crushing testimonial emoticons. There was also a photograph of an actual crucifixion in Africa supported by an incoherent denouncement of someone or other; and regardless of how worthwhile the cause may be, I dislike the gratuitous posting of anything or anyone being maimed, tortured or killed as inducement to why the rest of us should care. On a more positive note, she at least seemed to spend some time railing against the demonisation of the immigrant population in the United Kingdom, and Muslims in particular; although this was counterbalanced by remarks regarding Winston McKenzie, a black former UKIP politician making homophobic remarks on Celebrity Big Brother on the telly. They was all just picking on him, Hillsborough posited, because hes black but he got a right to say what he believes in and it says in the bibel that a man shall not lie with an other man coz that is just SICK SICK SICK and aint no1 can silence me form speakign trooth LLLLLLLOOOOOLLLL and shitloads more of those gleeful emoticons.

Oh fuck, I said to myself.

A few days later I shared a photograph of baby snakes taken in our garden. I like snakes, I like reptiles, and I like animals in general. I don't generally understand anyone who would regard an animal as disgusting. I'm not a big fan of maggots, but neither do I think my opinion of them means anything useful or interesting in the great scheme of things. Hillsborough on the other hand took a quite different view:

I hate those slimey nasty things Yuck I duno how ANY1 could like them or keep them as pets

The comment annoyed me for a couple of reasons. Firstly it seems poor form to respond to a facebook status message amounting to I think this is great with well, I think it's shit or equivalent, at least in cases like this where its hardly a political issue and anyone with the emotional development of at least a twelve-year old should be able to accept it as a matter of personal taste. My own facebook friends list includes a great many fans of Doctor Who in its present incarnation, and yet somehow I manage to keep myself from butting in to point out Dr Who is 4 kids and is shit LOL, because there really would be no point. Secondly, snakes aren't even remotely slimy so the observation struck me as akin to something an unusually stupid five-year old might say, the sort of thing which could only be expressed by a person with no actual experience of serpents nor any real justification for assuming their own opinion to be worth even the slightest fraction of an airborn fuck. I said as much, without the more obviously insulting details, which then prompted:

When god cast out satan he cast IT into a snake to "slither on its belly all his days" how could Any1 have them in there house fkn awful did u read on here about the woman pet snake who used to sleep in her bed ? (Probley fucking her too lol) she took it to the vet cos it didnt eat for 3 weeks and do u wana no wot the vet told her.....? He told her the snake was "starving itself" getting ready to eat her... GOOD!! it should of yam her up stupid bitch how can u lye with a snake in yr bed?? Jokers

I'd heard this story before, an urban legend which tends to get repeated because it appeals to idiots who assume that because some bloke said it, then it's probably true, just like that official British government document. Typing with gritted teeth, I pointed this out in the politest terms I could muster and provided a link to an article debunking the myth. Hillsborough still wasn't buying it:

im refering to a woman who posted her story herself about taking the snake to the vet, she posttd it herself as it was HER own story not "made up" and if any 1 makes up stories like that then they are sick in the head.... why would she of made up a story like that???? Snakes are DEMONIC+ UGLY i hate them

This was immediately followed by the bewildering the link you just posted claiming it was "made up" is of a snake and lion not a snake and human followed by a string of crying with laughter emoticons, the implication being u dont no nuffink LOL. The link I'd posted was to an article illustrated with a photograph of a lion engaging with a huge python, a photograph which showed up on my facebook page as part of the link. I couldn't tell if she disagreed with the article, or just didn't understand how a hyperlink works. Perhaps she believed I had simply posted a picture of a lion and told her the story was made up, because that's how it happens: somebody tells you something, and if you like what they say then it's probably true. I began a reply, but realised what I actually wanted to say was go fuck yourself, you thick cunt. Instead I defriended and then blocked her.

Whilst I'm happy to entertain a circle of virtual acquaintances who might not necessarily hold the same views as myself on every last subject, persons who regard homosexuality as evil in capital letters fall on the wrong side of the perimeter fence for me. Serpentgate therefore seemed as good an opportunity as any to correct the historical wrong of my buddying up to someone with whom I clearly lost touch for good reasons. It was depressing because I like to think the best of people, even thick cunts. I might have attempted to change her mind, but while there may be some moral credit to be gained in attempts to enlighten the bigoted or otherwise terminally ignorant, sometimes it's just pissing into the wind and a waste of everyone's time. This seemed like it would have been one of those cases.

Whilst the advent of the internet potentially brings us back into the orbit of everyone we've ever known, it equally serves to reduce much of its social interaction to angry sludge. Those with unpleasantly retarded views who might once have considered themselves isolated voices of reason are united as great virtual nations of foulness and horseshit spouting dangerous, hateful crap grounded only in it being what some bloke said which just happened to reinforce their existing prejudices because it's easier than thinking, and because it's more comforting than accepting that maybe you don't know everything after all. This, it seems to me, accounts for at least some of the popularity of Donald Trump in America and UKIP in England.

Living as I do at something of a remove from my own previous life, accessing it only through the narrow focus of a telephone line, I find it necessary to constantly remind myself that the image is distorted and that the general mass of humanity living just beyond the range of my experience really can't be quite so vile as they so often appear. Whilst the internet may well be reducing us all to angry sludge, I remind myself that I can now access books which once required that I schlep along to the British Library and fill in an application form; and I remind myself of all the people out there who I actually like, whom I never would have known were it not for the internet, whose online presence I find a daily source of delight; and it seems I'm not alone in this respect. I know of at least three other Englishmen who married American women in conclusion to transatlantic relationships which couldn't really have happened prior to the advent of the internet. One of them is my own cousin. With the other two, the three of us might almost be versions of the same individual from some alternate universe, such is the apparent concordance of our tastes and personalities, at least as they are expressed online. Against all odds, we are now a demographic, with the biggest difference between us being that I've moved to America whereas the other three couples have ended up in England.

So life is generally quiet, and not without trivial inconveniences and irritations, but there is no Damoclean grand piano hung over my head, suspended by a fraying length of twine as it would be in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. I get to write and paint and to just about get paid for it. I gave up smoking with no trouble worth mentioning. I get to keep my teeth. I don't yet have cancer, so far as I'm aware. I no longer fear being turfed out onto the street by a slum landlord who takes two thirds of my wages in rent. I no longer suffer loneliness or, generally speaking, the presence of idiots. The night sky in Texas is huge and full of many more stars than I was ever able to see in England, and the sun is so bright by day that the grass in my garden is the colour of the grass of childhood. If this isn't heaven, it's close enough for my purposes; and if the noise generated by idiots is occasionally annoying, I can at least tell by the hoarse clamour of their stupidity that they are far, far away.

*: Not actual names.